How Baristas at a VC-Backed Coffee Company Won a Union Contract
“As long as we didn’t have a union, we were at the mercy of this chaotic company as it was growing and changing,” one worker told More Perfect Union.
A collection of compact cafes, funded by high-profile investors and built around high-tech equipment, has rapidly spread across New York City.
But four years after their first cart opened in Brooklyn, employees at Blank Street Coffee have successfully unionized — and negotiated their first contract, covering more than a hundred workers at nearly half of the 40 locations in New York City. And their victory could provide valuable lessons to baristas and tech workers alike around the country.
Blank Street Coffee was founded by tech entrepreneurs Issam Freiha and Vinay Menda. These long-time acquaintances from the start-up world worked together at a venture capitalist firm in Manhattan, before amassing $67 million from prominent venture capital firms to found Blank Street in 2021.
Blank Street began four years ago with small, mobile vending carts stocked with super-automatic coffee machines that churn out hundreds of espressos per hour with the help of the advanced Eversys coffee system. The carts have since transitioned into cafes that usually have only one or two employees working at a time.
Like most tech start-ups in their early stages, Blank Street presented themselves as a progressive, worker-friendly company: they guaranteed their baristas at least $23 an hour — much higher than the hourly wage at many coffee shops in the city — and they offered internships for social media marketing and human resources at the company.
“It presents itself as a very tech-forward facing company,” Tuscany Foussard, a bargaining committee member at one of the Manhattan locations who began working there after college, told More Perfect Union. “It was a very nice place to work.”
But after anchoring themselves in New York, Blank Street began pursuing rapid growth by expanding into Boston, Washington D.C, and London, and the company underwent a massive overhaul during the summer of 2022. Shortly after replacing their Director of Operations, all of the carts were closed, workers were laid off, and the company’s casual ambiance became more strict.
“The casual, do-it-yourself vibe was replaced with more corporate rigor,” said Foussard. “It became less about quality and more about quantity and volume.”
The company also revoked the internship program, according to Foussard, which was a big blow to a workforce that trends young and queer.
Work at Blank Street, however, was not exactly picturesque before that summer. In reality, discontent was already brewing amongst the workers; the stores were frequently packed and understaffed, many employees saw their hours cut, and workers’ health and safety concerns often went unaddressed.
“The store I worked at in Williamsburg was small and not taken care of,” Sequoya Waring, an employee who serves on the bargaining committee, told More Perfect Union. “There were a lot of safety issues like mold and mechanical issues like pipes falling apart…safety issues we kept reaching out to management about that weren’t getting resolved, and we weren’t the only store.”
Blank Street abandoned the original idea of serving coffee from small, eco-friendly carts because they were very unsafe. They consistently broke down or malfunctioned, and couldn’t withstand harsh temperatures. One employee even recalled smoke emitting from their cart, the website Hellgate reported last year.
In July 2022, Blank Street Coffee workers contacted the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 1500, which represents more than 18,000 members across the New York metro area. The union helped the Blank Street employees spearhead an organizing effort at 19 of the city’s 40 stores, with demands including a regular raise structure, paid time off, and a minimum standard for hours scheduled.
“As long as we didn’t have a union, we were at the mercy of this chaotic company as it was growing and changing,” said Jaye Balentine, a member of both the organizing and bargaining committee at one of the Brooklyn locations. “They could easily let the consequences of that fall on the workers. We think they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with dodging the consequences that we experience the brunt of.”
When negotiations began, the executives at Blank Street Coffee hired Jackson Lewis — a notorious union-busting law firm that has previously represented Amazon and Google, among others — to defeat the drive. Contract negotiations began last June.
Waring said that the lawyers stalled to extend negotiations with the hopes of outlasting both the main union committee members (many of whom quit out of dissatisfaction), as well as others’ interest in unionizing, assuming that many did not believe the effort would bear fruit.
“A lot of it was delay tactics. [The lawyer] would say ‘This topic will be in the next session or two,’” said Waring. “They can’t tell us that they won’t give us a counter-proposal, so they would be as vague as possible. We would come to the next session and ask, ‘Where is the proposal?’ And he would say, ‘Well, I said the next one or two sessions, so it probably will be tomorrow or the next day.’”
But this did not demoralize the Blank Street workers, who fought hard to win people over to their side. They did much of their work outside of working hours to avoid detection from management; they went to other Blank Street locations to talk to workers there, approached sympathetic workers in their stores to join the effort, and organized neighborhood meet-ups to invite workers who had questions about the union effort or wanted to get involved. When they went public about holding an election in December 2022, they produced educational and agitational graphics to spread on Instagram.
Waring said they also received a lot of guidance from UFCW, who sent two bargainers and lawyers to assist during negotiations. Right before the negotiations ended, the workers were preparing to launch a pamphlet campaign to publicize their fight.
The efforts of the workers, coupled with the new company’s desire to maintain a good public image, allowed for a relatively short negotiation period of nine months; it takes an average of 465 days for new unions and their employers to reach a first collective bargaining agreement, according to a 2022 Bloomberg analysis. And Blank Street workers won a contract that met a lot of their initial demands: $0.50 annual raises (with a contract cap of $1.50), time-and-a-half pay on certain holidays, guaranteed paid time off, a minimum of 30 hours per week for full-time employees, enrollment in UFCW‘s legal plan, and more.
Blank Street is just one story in the surge of organizing at coffee shops and cafes. UFCW has unionized Partners Coffee in Brooklyn, who are currently negotiating their first contract. And baristas at corporate giants like Starbucks and Blue Bottle have made enormous gains, with Starbucks Workers United winning key concessions and forcing the world’s biggest coffee company back to the table after nearly two years of delays.
The union members at Blank Street plan to make an easy-to-read, condensed version of their contract to post online as a resource for other baristas. They also have their sights set on the other 21 Blank Street locations in New York that have not yet unionized.
“We’ve already had baristas from other cafes asking to see our contract to see what they can reasonably get if they are able to unionize,” Waring said.
Many of the union committee members believe it is likely that the other Blank Street locations and coffee shops will follow suit, and hopefully expand on the precedent they set.
“We’ve talked about our contract as setting a bare minimum,” Balentine said. “So that other organizing drives can take this and say, ‘This has been won before, let’s take that and add something more to it.’”